Haunted
by PJ XD
Summary: Hotshot young Agent Jasper Whitlock of the FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit, is hunting a serial killer. On the job, he meets and falls for an intern at the local hospital, Edward Cullen. But as the case starts to unfold and spiral, Jasper starts to wonder if Edward knows more about the sinister goings on in Seattle than he's letting on. E/J Slash OOC Mature themes


**A/N - Hello all! Thought I'd try my hand at a new slash fic. Dark and twisty, as opposed to light and breezy. Still plenty of my light and breezy stuff left to come, but this idea really took hold of me, and it wouldn't let me write anything else until I got it out there. **

**Hope you enjoy it.**

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_"Your nightmares follow you like a shadow, forever." Aleksandar Hemon_

_**Jasper POV**_

I've always hated reporters.

They're like gnats. No, wait. Worse. They're like vultures circling a carcass, just waiting for the opportunity to swoop down and tear it wide open.

Tonight, I'm the carcass.

I lean forward on the bar stool, bracing my elbows on the sticky countertop and studiously ignoring the weaselly little guy who has just slid onto the vacant seat on my right.

He doesn't get the hint. Persistence is just one of his many, many annoying qualities. "Agent Whitlock, do you have a minute?"

"No, Mike. I'm swamped right now." I take a swig of my beer. Why can't a guy be allowed to enjoy a little downtime in peace?

"Drinking on the job, Agent?"

"I'm off the clock." And I'm starting to wish I'd chosen to head home and enjoy my solitude without stopping off at the bar.

"Can I ask you a few questions about the Seattle Reaper case?"

I swivel on my stool so that I'm now facing him. Mike is five-foot-eight, and built like a toothpick, but he's not the kind of guy that is easily intimidated. More's the pity.

"Sure thing. You can ask. Doesn't mean I'm gonna tell you."

He grins, and I realize I've made a mistake in even engaging with him. Any words that he can elicit from me at all are a victory in his eyes, no matter how much information is actually yielded from my responses.

"Were the Vasquezs' – you know, the couple who were found murdered last night – the most recent victims of the Reaper?"

I stare stonily at him without responding. He continues, evidently undeterred. I'm not even kinda surprised. It would take a head-on collision with an eighteen-wheeler to derail this guy.

"What do you say to the rumors that the Reaper is actually a rogue cop?"

I feel safe answering that one. "That they're just that. Rumors."

"Do you have any leads on the perp?"

"Unsub. Unknown subject, not 'perp'," I correct automatically. "And if I do, I'm not sharin' them with you." I glance at him with an expression of extreme distaste. "You're not even supposed to be writin' an article on this, or so I hear."

Mike raises his blond eyebrows. "And what's that supposed to mean?"

"I heard that you got demoted, is all."

He scowls deeply, and I feel a tingle of satisfaction spread through my chest. "Where did you hear that?"

"I'm a fed," I reply evenly. "I have my sources. And, unlike yours, they're actually tellin' the truth. That's why you've been dumped back in the basement, isn't it? A faulty informant?"

"Go to hell, Whitlock." His grimace twists his face so that his visage goes from averagely attractive to downright ugly in less than a second.

"Or, how about you crawl back into the hole you came out of and leave us to conduct our investigations in peace?"

The voice comes from just behind me, and I twist in my seat to see Emmett, one of my fellow profilers, standing at my shoulder. He's divested himself of his suit jacket, and has the sleeves of his dress shirt pushed up to the elbows, tie loosened like mine. He runs one hand through thick black curls and shoots me a dimpled grin.

"You're late," I accuse, shoving the beer I've been guarding for him in his direction. He catches it in one mammoth hand as it slides along the bar top and takes a long swig.

"Sorry. Got caught up. And then, there was a reporter in my chair." His gray-green eyes narrow in Mike's direction pointedly. "Please vacate it, immediately."

Mike Newton might pester me for information, but he's not stupid enough to try the same tack with Emmett. That might have something to do with the fact that he's six-five and built like an NFL linebacker.

With one last pained grimace at me, Mike slides off the stool and shuffles off back into his own corner of the bar with his tail between his legs like a good little press hound.

Emmett drops onto the seat a second later.

"Where are the others?" I ask.

"Maria's still at the station interviewing the Vasquez kids. Peter stayed with her to help, and Charlie's overseeing everything, as usual. Rosalie went back to the hotel to get some sleep."

I nod, and then frown. "What about Bree?"

"She's still plugged into the databases, trying to get a lead." Emmett shrugs and lifts his beer to his lips again.

"Ever feel like we're kinda half-assin' our jobs?" I muse, indicating the beer I'm nursing.

Em grins. "Hey, at least we're out in the real world, not catching up on our beauty sleep like Hale."

I hide a smile. Emmett and Rosalie are the two most antagonistic members of our team, and they're constantly trading verbal blows. It gives the rest of us something to laugh at, because everyone in the known universe can tell that they're into each other… apart from the two of them.

"Yeah, but we're drinkin' beer while Maria and Peter do the interviews with the Vasquez kids. Makes me feel sorta guilty."

"We all deserve a little downtime," Emmett says reasonably. "This job is fucking hard enough as it is."

And ain't that the truth. Each case just seems to get progressively worse. We're the people who lock up the real sick fucks in the world. The serial killers. The child molesters. But this 'Reaper' guy… well, put it this way, I've seen a lot of shit in my time, but nothing quite like this.

This is the case that my nightmares are having nightmares about.

My phone buzzes in my pocket, snapping me out of my dark thoughts. It's already halfway to my ear before I even register that I'm answering it.

"Whitlock," I bark.

"Hey, Tex."

"Bree," I greet her, feeling a smile turning the corners of my lips upwards. "What have you got for me, babygirl?"

"Some good, some bad, and some downright nasty." She pauses. "Mostly the downright nasty. These crime scene pictures are making me feel all queasy inside."

Bree is the youngest member of our team at only twenty-two, but she's also the smartest. And I mean genius-level intelligence. She's Einstein in a C-cup. She was offered a job with the FBI after they caught her hacking into the Pentagon for fun with software she designed from scratch. The best part? It only took her forty-six seconds.

"Okay, well, gimme the good first."

"I've got Gatorade."

"And?"

"That's the only good news."

I sigh slightly. I'd been hoping for something more than that. "You've not had any luck tracin' back the credit card we found on Daniel Vasquez?"

"The trail goes cold, Jasper."

"Nothin' useful at all?" I trace the neck of my beer with my index finger, pressing the phone tighter to my ear.

"He had absolutely no crossover spending with any of the other victims. It's like looking for a needle in a haystack. No, wait, actually, it's like looking for a needle in a pile of needles. I'm batting zero."

"And they never bought similar purchases in the last two weeks?"

"Nope. Nothing."

I sigh again, resisting the urge to bury my face in my hands. "Okay. Maybe you should widen the parameters of the search?"

"They can't get any wider, without me resorting to using eenie meanie minie mo as a way to pick out the unsub's next potential victims."

"Okay, Bree. Call me if you get a sudden wave of brilliance?"

"You got it."

She disconnects the call.

Emmett is watching me questioningly when I lower the phone from my ear. "What did she say?"

"That she's not found anythin' remotely useful." I stuff my phone back into my pocket as the feeling of intense frustration creeps over me once more. "We're gonna need to visit the dump site tomorrow and see if we can turf anythin' up there."

Emmett nods grimly. "Hopefully Maria and Peter will have made some headway with the kids by then. Diego Vasquez still isn't saying a word, and little Carmen was still crying when I left."

I close my eyes in a futile attempt to shut out the horror of that thought. "Of course she is. Her fuckin' parents were just murdered."

"This psychotic son of a bitch is worse than Chicago," Emmett whispers, and I find myself nodding automatically. Up until now, Chicago was easily my worst case. Seventeen year old girls were being snatched up, beaten, tortured, raped and then forced to kill each other in a Gladiator-style showdown for the unsub's entertainment. The victor of that match would then be raped and choked until she died of strangulation.

We got the bastard, in the end, but I can still see every one of those poor kids' faces when I shut my eyes at night.

This time, Emmett's phone is the one that buzzes. He extracts it almost as swiftly as I had.

"McCarty."

I hear some incomprehensible chatter on the other end, and can just about identify the voice as that of Charlie Swan, our SSA and team leader of the BAU.

"Already?" Emmett's eyebrows shoot up so fast that they almost disappear into his curls. "Uh, yeah, sure thing. I'm with Jasper right now. We'll head over to Memorial."

He hangs up.

"What did…?"

"They found another body."

My eyes widen. "But it's only been three days."

"I know." Emmett looks graver than I've ever seen him – if you'll excuse the expression.

"He's escalatin'."

"Yeah." Emmett sighs. "And we've got to get over to the morgue. Hurry up and finish your beer, Jazz."

I stand, draining my drink in two gulps. "I'm done, let's go."

* * *

"Same cause of death as the other men?" I check, leaning against one of the frigid work benches as my eyes rake over the corpse half-covered by a sheet on the metal slab in the center of the room.

The coroner nods. "This one was stabbed sixty-three times."

"Overkill," Emmett mutters. "And the rage only seems to be getting worse."

"This victim is Caucasian," I observe quietly. "The last one was Hispanic, and the one before that African American. So there's definitely no racial motivator."

"I've never seen anything like these bodies," the coroner whispers, sounding faintly nauseated. "Butchered isn't even close to what this guy has done to these poor men."

He has a point. Sixty-three stab wounds to the torso and face is extreme overkill. The kind of overkill that indicates true rage, like the Unsub is using the victim as a surrogate for someone else.

"The female victims… they weren't stabbed, were they?"

Both Emmett and the coroner glance up at me. The latter has a light sheen of sweat covering his bald pate – more to do with the grisly nature of our conversation than the temperature, I'm assuming, because it's fuckin' freezing in this morgue.

"No," he answers. "Shot once in the head."

"Execution style," Emmett muses, and I immediately know that he's cottoned onto my train of thought. "So… the Unsub's rage is directed at the male victims alone."

"Any sign of sexual assault in the victim, Doc?" I ask.

He shudders. "No, thank God for small favors."

"The stabbing could indicate impotence?" Emmett suggests. I pull a face.

"Maybe…" I hedge. "But I dunno. I think there might be somethin' else goin' on here."

"Cover him back up," Emmett says, nodding towards the body. "We'll need a copy of the full report, please."

I dig in my pocket for my phone. "I'm gonna call Maria and fill her in. You good to finish up in here?"

After a quick nod of assent from Emmett, I duck out of the morgue into the near-empty corridor.

One glance at my phone shows that, as well as being a creepy-ass place to be at ten pm, the morgue corridor also has shitty cell phone reception. With a sigh, I head over to the elevators and punch one thumb onto the 'call' button.

When I emerge onto the ground floor, the emergency room is buzzing with late-night activity. Half of drunken downtown Seattle seems to have turned out in this place, bleeding from various minor wounds. I make my way along the corridor, narrowly avoiding being mowed down by a harassed looking nurse carrying a precariously stacked pile of hospital charts.

"Hey, can I get an orderly over here?"

A voice, deep and clear, rings out over the general hubbub, and I twist in the direction of the sound reflexively. My gaze lands on a head of messy bronze hair, attached to a lean guy in powder-blue scrubs. He's trying unsuccessfully to gently wrestle a struggling patient back onto his gurney.

Without even thinking about it, my feet carry me towards him to lend some assistance. The patient is a guy in his mid-forties, and I can instantly tell from his far-off, vacant look and frantic muttering that he's not right in the head.

"Come on, sir, you mustn't get up right now… Ow! Mr. Buford, you're hurting the nice intern who's just trying to help you…" The intern winces as the guy twists in his grip. He's still putting up a fight, right up until I reach over and firmly push the patient back down onto his bed.

"Thanks." The guy in scrubs turns, and I nearly stop breathing.

He's gotta be the most attractive person I've ever seen in real life. He's pale, like most folks round here, with the bone-structure of an Abercrombie model and eyes that are so green that they're luminous. His full lips part in surprise when he clocks me.

"Oh. You're not staff."

Holy shit, he's gorgeous. I'm trying real hard not to stare. It's been eighteen months, since Alex dumped my ass, in fact, since I've looked at a guy and really _seen_ him.

I certainly see this one.

"No," I say, when I realize he's actually waiting for a response from me. "No, I'm not staff. You just looked like you needed help."

He nods, a quick bob of his head, and sets about securing the patient's wrist restraints. "Sorry about that. He keeps trying to escape."

"Psych ward?" I check. Like he could be destined for anywhere else with those wrist and ankle restraints attached to his gurney.

"I'm on psychiatric rotation, this month." The intern sighs wearily, scrubbing one hand down his face, and then turns back to study me again. His expression is kinda… speculative.

"Are you a doctor?"

He gives me a sheepish smile. "Yeah. Well, I'm an intern. Edward Cullen – my name, by the way. But, I mean, you can call me man-nurse if you want. Everyone else does." He sticks out one pale, long-fingered hand, and after a second's pause, I take it.

"Jasper Whitlock."

"Are you injured?" His luminous eyes search mine for a moment. I frown at him, not understanding why he'd ask that question, before I realize that he's a doctor and I'm standing in the emergency room. Duh.

"Oh, no. I'm actually with the FBI. We're here about…"

"Those horrible murders?" Dr. Cullen's eyes go wide, and he drops his voice to barely more than a whisper. I'm trying to place his age, because at the moment, he doesn't look a day over twenty-five, which would put him at four years younger than me.

I nod. "Yeah. Have you seen anythin'?"

The good doctor presses his lips together, nodding slightly. "I was here the night they brought that poor Vasquez man and his wife into the morgue. It was awful. I've never seen anything…" he sucks in a breath, a shudder running the entire length of his spine. "You're going to catch the person who's doing this, right?"

"Count on it," I assure him. "I'm not leavin' Seattle until I do."

"Good." He smiles at me then, a bright, earnest smile that makes my chest constrict. "I better get Mr. Buford here back to the ward, but thank you for your help. And good luck, Agent Whitlock."

"Thanks, Doc."

Watching his retreating back as he wheels the gurney along the corridor, I can't help but feel a familiar fluttering in the pit of my stomach. I'm out of practice, but I recognize the emotion. Nervousness. The good kind.

Once he's been swallowed up by the crowd, I snap my attention back to my cell. To my surprise, I see a text message from Maria waiting for me.

_Get back to the station ASAP. Carmen is talking._

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**Thanks for reading!**

**PJ**

**x**


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